Thousands of Greek students mounted sit-ins and participated in protests in Athens Friday, to call for justice for those who lost their lives in the nation's deadliest train accident.
A passenger train and a freight train crashed in Larissa, Greece on Tuesday, resulting in at least 57 fatalities. The passenger train carried approximately 350 passengers, many of whom are still missing.
Around 5,000 protesters gathered in the capital outside the offices of network operators Hellenic Train, who took over the entire network in 2017, to voice their outrage at the decadeslong inability to increase rail network safety despite near-fatal incidents in the past.
After demonstrators red-dappled the word "murderers" on the building's glass facade, the audience yelled out in outrage. "We are furious beyond measure. It's unacceptable that such a horrific incident occurs in 2023," said Angelos Thomopoulos, a protester.
To demand that those involved in this atrocity be held accountable and that nothing be hushed up, we are marching to the streets today, he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). The majority of the demonstrators were college students, many of whom were of similar age as the victims of Tuesday's collision, the worst rail accident in Greece's history.
Maria Psacheli, another demonstrator, claimed that her own child frequently traveled the same journey to attend university, she told AFP at the Athens rally.
"I'm thinking of the victims' families," she said with tears in her eyes. Later protests are scheduled in Athens and Greece's second-largest city, Thessaloniki.
Most of the victims were students in their 20s returning from a long weekend. Students were staging sit-ins in over two dozen university faculties and schools around the country.
Black sheets were draped at the entrances of several universities and white roses were thrown onto the tracks of the local train station in Larissa. The Larissa station master on duty at the time of the disaster has been arrested and charged with negligent homicide.
He has accepted partial responsibility for failing to reroute the trains and faces a possible life sentence if convicted. But train unionists note that safety problems on the Athens-Thessaloniki railway line had been known for years.
Five years after the state-owned Greek rail operator Trainose was privatized, sold to Italy's Ferrovie Dello Stato Italiane, and rebranded as Hellenic Train, the safety mechanisms on the line are still not entirely automated. "I was always hesitant to use the train because I knew that line wasn't safe," Aphrodite a 20-year-old student said. The company received a bomb threat on Friday, but it turned out to be a fake.